Wilhelm Hoettl
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Wilhelm Hoettl (March 19, 1915-June 27, 1999) was an Austrian Nazi Party member, S.S. Officer, secret agent, author, and Doctor of History.
He was born in Vienna in March 1915. In 1938, at the remarkably young age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. While still a student there, he joined the Nazi party (member 6309616) and the SS (no. 309510). From 1939 until the end of the war in Europe, Hoettl was employed almost without interruption by Germany's central intelligence agency, the RSHA. He was first stationed in Vienna with the "foreign bureau" and then moved to Berlin where he was promoted to the rank of Major. In 1944 he became Lieutenant-Colonel with the title of Acting Head of Intelligence and Counter Espionage in Central and South-east Europe. In March he was assigned to Budapest, where he served as second in command to Heinrich Himmler's SS representative in Hungary, and as political advisor to Hitler's ambassador there, Edmund Veesenmayer, who reported to Berlin, for example, on the large-scale deportations in 1944 of Jews from Hungary.
After the war Hoettl figured prominently as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trial. In an affidavit dated November 25, 1945, Hoettl recounted a conversation he held with Adolf Eichmann in August 1944 during the closing days of the war. The meeting of the two men took place at Hoettl's office in Budapest:
"(Eichmann) expressed his conviction that Germany had lost the war and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he would be considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations, since he had millions of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many that was, to which he answered that although the number was a great Reich secret, he would tell me since I, as a historian too, would be interested and that probably he would not return anyhow from his command in Romania. He had, shortly before that, made a report to Himmler, as the latter wanted to know the exact number of Jews who had been killed. Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia."
The hearsay evidence in Hoettl's affidavit became the authoritative basis for the claim that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers have questioned the veracity of Hoettl's affidavit and have vigorously contested the "six-million" number. At his trial Eichmann denied the attributed motivation claiming "I have never stated that I have anyone's death on my conscience."
